The deadline for the self-nominations (see appended email from
Ralph) is June 4, 2017. The current, and any further, nominees
are requested to send the following information to the three
current co-chairs (see email addresses below), also by June 4,
so that it may be shared with the IG members for the subsequent
election:

- the reason(s) for wanting to serve as a future co-chair of
this IG;
- their geographic region & gender;
- their ideas for the future work of the IG.

Dear members of the RDA RPRD IG,
After soliciting nominations for candidates to serve as additional
co-chairs of the Research Data Alliance (RDA) Repository Platforms for
Research Data (RPRD) Interest Group (IG), we are pleased to report that we
have five candidates. In preparation for our election, we are initially
providing information on the candidates nominated for the additional
co-chair positions. Please expect to receive a separate email message
inviting you to vote in the election to fill the two additional co-chair
positions within the next few days and find the list, below, in
alphabetical order, of the five candidates who have been nominated to serve
as additional co-chairs of the RDA RPRD IG.
Sridhar Gutam
Mike Jones (Mendeley Data)
João Rocha da Silva
André Schaaff
Dr Mayank Trivedi
The candidates also were asked to submit a statement about their candidacy
and one statement has been received. Please find, below, the candidate's
statement received from João Rocha da Silva:
- - - - Beginning of Candidate's Statement from João Rocha da
Silva - - - -
The reason(s) for wanting to serve as a future co-chair of this IG
The topic of repository platforms for research data is very close to my
research topics and expertise, as I have been working on research data
management since 2011. I am currently a PostDoc researcher at INESC TEC and
the lead developer of Dendro, a “Dropbox+Semantic Wiki” for researchers to
store, describe and share data to any repository (we implement deposit to
practically all platforms). I am also co-author of a recent overview of
repository platforms.
I got my PhD in 2016 with the topic “Usage-driven Application Profile
generation using Ontologies”, where I designed and built a system that
would help researchers describe their datasets using sets of descriptors
suited to their domain. In short, I am passionate about Open Science and
data sharing.
I feel that we need to give development work much needed recognition in
order to entice more developers to write code for open-source repository
platforms. At the same time, we should reinforce the connection with
researchers, since they are the users of the platforms we so carefully
develop and implement.
My experience with researchers tells me that they need to know more about
repository platforms and try them out, so that they 1. Champion for their
adoption at their institutions and research groups, 2. Tell platform
developers how it went, so that they can continuously improve their
software and 3. Turn this experience into success stories that the IG can
use to illustrate the value of a repository platform for research at large.
Geographic Region & Gender
I am a 30-year-old male. I live in Porto, Portugal.
Ideas for the future work of the IG
The IG should serve as a platform to bring together users (researchers),
open-source developers, platforms providers and the institutions who need a
data repository. I believe that the IG should:
- Raise awareness among researchers at the institutions of our group
members about the existing data management platforms and inquire about what
they need a repository platform to do. It would be very interesting to
perform a before/after study to determine the impact of the IG in said
institutions;
- Identify repository platform “champions” and success stories for every
main repository platform, the people responsible for implementation, lists
of modifications or parametrization that had to be made to the base
software, any training initiatives and how researchers responded to them;
- Provide an updated overview of requirements for a data repository and
how well the main platforms in the “market” satisfy those requirements.
Players such as CKAN, DuraSpace, Zenodo, EUDAT and Figshare should be
invited to weigh in, helping potential adopters to choose between them,
while contributing with requirements for their development roadmaps;
- Launch developer calls and hackathons for CS students and other
developers to contribute to open-source software in research contexts or
otherwise. The RDA Repository Platforms IG “brand” should start to appear
in publications of young researchers who want to get into data repositories.
- - - - End of Candidate's Statement from João Rocha da Silva
- - - -
Your Co-Chairs,
Robert R. Downs <***@***.***>
Stefan Kramer <***@***.***>
Ralph Müller-Pfefferkorn <***@***.***-dresden.de>